With design elements inspired by nearby Tiantai Mountain and the Haishan Islands, a new bookstore in Taizhou City (on China’s central coast) is putting all our cute little corner bookshops to shame. This article was posted in English but is essentially a long string of AI-translated text-fragments, amounting to something like found poetry. The gist of it is that Tengda Zhongshuge Bookstore was designed by Jun Zhu for ETER Architecture, who used elements of local geography for inspiration. Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs:

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Pass top tall bookcase and low bookcase interweave combination at space, look like waterfall and mountain forest at a distance, be in among them, having completely different feeling again, brunet ground mapping bookcase is like the inverted image in water, make originally shocking “landscape painting” more show poetic feeling, make a person indulges in.

Honestly, there’s something about these translations that match the oneiric overstimulation of the store itself, as the following pictures attest. (Chinese bookstore design is decidedly maximalist.)

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Jonny Diamond

Jonny Diamond

Jonny Diamond is the Editor in Chief of Literary Hub. He lives in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains with his wife and two sons, and is currently writing a cultural history of the axe for W.W. Norton. @JonnyDiamondJonnyDiamond.me